Browsing Tag

web 2.0

5 Early Warning Signs that YOU are a TRUE Fan of Social Media

So with all the buzz around Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans, the holy grail of social media artist, I was thinking how do you know if you’re a true fan, so I got a little introspective and did a little browsing of my network to TRY and identify 5 attributes/activities/attitudes of a true fan of social media:

1. YOU realized Facebook is not just a way to stay in touch, but a way to for YOU to understand: With the myriad of applications available, there are a lot of things you can do on Facebook, but do you use the network to better know people, what they do and WHO they are and WHY?

2. YOU use tags as your main browsing/search option: You prefer to browse by bookmarks rather than traditional search on google. Has folksonomy become your taxonomy?

3. YOU appreciate contribution/sharing as much as consuming: Community is about engaging and sharing and as much as any other noun, social media is about community and the conversations which emerge. This item also means you want your favorite sites to be up, rather than down, (think twitter) and you understand it’s the value of your network, not the size.

4. YOU are constantly on the lookout for the next killer widget: When new platforms emerge, new widgets show up on someone’s blog or you get an invite to participate in a beta -you do it because you want to see if it can improve your life and your relationships.

5. YOU vote with your spend/click for your key influencers: This is the final stop in social media fan-dom, you appreciate the folks who influence your social media experience and click on ads which are of low interest, buy their book or hire them for a speaking or consulting engagement. (That being said – I don’t like keyword ads.)

Human Intervention: markets in the making

So I spent some time understanding a little more the impact of social media over the holidays, basically in response to the online norm piece and a comment on art from gapingvoid guy, [tag]Hugh MacLeod[/tag].   People who interact online can impact online markets and untimately offline concerns as well.  O’Reilly had a [tag]Bill Janeway[/tag], from [tag]investment banking[/tag] firm [tag]Warburg Pincus[/tag], quote on the [tag]Money:Tech[/tag] conference which is fairly relevant in context of human interaction’s impact on financial activity:

The timeliness of this Conference is NOT only because “web 2.0” technologies and business models have reached critical mass in the financial markets. It is also because, as driven by the web more generally, the frontier between human and machine-decision making has become radically problematic. First, quantitative approaches in trading, pricing, valuation, asset definition vastly expanded the domain for machine decision-making. But then the humans struck back, by refusing to act like the mindless molecules that the models driving machine decision-making required. The self-reflective, behavioral attributes of human market participants is now driving back that frontier, requiring innovations in every aspect of financial market processes, beginning with techniques of risk measurement and risk management. When price is an inverse function of [tag]liquidity[/tag] and liquidity is an inverse function of price certainty, the recursive loop can only be broken by human intervention and action

Wow – what a mouthful and insightful – people impact markets. The significant investment in optimized algorythm based business models online may have a challenger – human interaction as it relates to online advertising.

Changed search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing platform which best serves as a sliver markets to a high value market channel at some point in the future?   While not necessarily the mainstream population, active online human decision makers continue to collectively impact markets, one might say communities.   Facebook, Twitter or others represent segments of market influencers and makers. Most [tag]Facebook valuation[/tag] discussions all essentially acknowledge a significant market segmentation asset.

Communities as Market Makers

The current underpinnings of the global social media infrastructure (Xobni, [tag]Utterz[/tag], Twitter, [tag]Plaxo[/tag] [tag]LinkedIn[/tag], [tag]Flickr[/tag], [tag]Flock[/tag]…) are establishing market definitions, definitions of buyer classes in their highly attributed/user extended data model.   So that begets the question as to how does a collective commonality define a market? Are there bookmark markets? Blog markets? “Group” Markets?

It’s reasonable to infer this is in fact the case. Sites/Platforms such a Digg,  writing cabals creating content and individuals bring together friends and randoms around a common set of attributes which should they sustain overtime may in fact create micro-markets. Not a believer?  Go to Gizmodo – That IS a Gizmodo market.

Sure advertising is inherently audience biased and to that end the delivery vehicle has just changed, but can the vehicles actually begin to deliver value add services – access to branded public information, focusedcontent and web service community tools across an interoperable network.  Imagine it – share attributes (friends, content, services…) could be managed through a unified market based UI – the Facebook user who likes cooking, the Truemors reader who looks up his 401k balance on the truemors interface – there are all kinds of abstract concepts and extensions. Once the social media markets mature from their currently narrowly banded spiky reality, these may be the only advertising markets – community focused views of online commerce, communication and service consumption.

So now on to the the abstract thought to end the article.  Does an individual define the market or an individual’s relationships?  If it’s the latter, Facebook may be under valued and the usability race has begun!

A Geographic content confluence… 25 Geographic Blog Topics

Gravity Model

I continue to notice that there are just not enough people blogging on geography or other concepts which are moderately academic in nature. To that end I have set forth to think of 25 ideas to stimulate the hidden geographers out there, who are also bloggers and have a desire to document a sense of space. Social commentary on a geographic concepts just might be interesting and so I have put together a list of items for consideration/stealing.

  1. What is the geographic distribution of the people YOU are following on Twitter?
  2. What is the most interesting place you found on accident while on a business trip?
  3. Determine the applicability of a “virtual” [tag]gravity model[/tag] and where a [tag]meme[/tag] started
  4. A virtual survey of barn types available of [tag]Flickr[/tag].
  5. Map YOUR 2001 Summer Tour with [tag]Widespread Panic[/tag]
  6. A content analysis of blog posts tagged as [tag]Georgia[/tag]
  7. Map the places you have visited on business via [tag]Google[/tag] maps
  8. Why I don’t ever want to go to [tag]Orlando[/tag] again for a conference
  9. Determine the geographic distribution of [tag]Technorati[/tag]’s [tag]top 100[/tag] blogs
  10. Does the core periphery model apply to blogs hosted by [tag]Harvard[/tag], with Cambridge as the core?
  11. Why the view at (insert venue) makes it the best place to see live music outdoors
  12. Contrast and compare the level of education associated with bloggers in [tag]Bezerkly[/tag], [tag]Madison[/tag], [tag]Ann Arbor[/tag] and [tag]Austin[/tag]?
  13. Where is the worst place to have a conference?
  14. What airport has the best localized representation of food stuff and gear?
  15. A geographic survey of Uncle Jay’s blog roll, by type, relative to the 2004 presidential red and [tag]blue states[/tag].
  16. What cities are all of your [tag]Grateful Dead[/tag] T-shirts from?
  17. How long must one travel to consider it a roadtrip?
  18. Where are the randoms from in your [tag]Facebook[/tag] network from?
  19. Where is the best show you NEVER went to from in your live music collection?
  20. Why the roads in [tag]Boston[/tag] made me late for my customer meeting – AGAIN!
  21. Where is the best sports stadium in the world?
  22. The different between avenues and streets in NYC
  23. Where is the best place to do nothing at?
  24. A survey of cities where you actually saw more than the airport, hotel and office/conference center
  25. What is the smallest city you actually flew to and why?

Do you have a hidden geographer?

A quick note of appreciation to 3 folks that I synthesized this from – [tag]Chris Carfi[/tag] (business travel posts), [tag]Chris Brogan[/tag] (conference twitter posts and 100 list) and [tag]Jeremiah Owyang[/tag] (meme following)